Re: Show Yourselves, Part 4: Sucking up bandwidth with poor pictures of weird tattoos
How did you enjoy that actually? Some buddies and myself have given serious thought to doing one of those when they are in the Midwest...
LOTS of fun. We started with a
ChumpCar race at Texas World Speedway, then followed it up this past weekend with the
LeMons race at MSR Houston. My first time driving at race speed was in the Friday practice session before the TWS race, then my first time doing wheel-to-wheel racing was the actual races there. Although I'd learned a little bit of technique from GT5, nothing can really prepare you for the feeling you get when you drop into a banked turn at WOT going 90+. And doing the build was a lot of fun too, it was my first time spending any significant amount of time wrenching on a car and I've learned quite a bit about different things that make them tick.
If you want to get into it, I would
strongly recommend reading Erik's "so you want to drive in LeMons" thread, which applies pretty much equally to ChumpCar:
http://forums.24hoursoflemons.com/viewtopic.php?id=7415 — Erik covers the most important points on finances (a "$500 car" costs at least four to six times that to race, depending on how much your team can invest in sweat equity and just how many chances you want to take on the car breaking down), team organization, and alternative ways to getting seat time. Our team is a group of equals that pretty much decides what to do on a combination of consensus and what the main mechanical guy wants to (and is willing to) do. Our total costs for the first race, including entry fees and consumables, were about $5000; we did not have to spend for cage fab because we had a good welder on the team, and we were pretty liberal in doing the best we could to make sure that our wrenching time was all spent beforehand rather than at the track.
Although the two series have somewhat different rules and sensibilities, there's enough overlap that a team that wants to drive in both series can do it easily as long as they plan up-front to build to the common rules requirements.
If you want to follow up with me on anything, feel free... my preferred email is (firstname).(lastname)@gmail.com, where lastname is Powers.
